Synthesis and Constructive Alienation: Talk by Patricia Reed

Patricia Reed is an artist and writer based in Berlin. She has exhibited at the Witte de With, Netherlands; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Germany; Kunsthaus Langenthal, Switzerland; and the Württembergische Kunstverein, Germany. Reed’s texts have been published in #ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader; The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Vol. II; Intangible Economies; Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noopolitics; and Fillip. She has given lectures at the ICA, London; IMA, Australia; the Montréal Biennale, Canada; Tate Britain, London; Artists Space, USA; and MIT, USA, among others. Reed hosts the Inclinations lecture series in Berlin and is part of the Laboria Cuboniks working group.



To begin the task of constructing horizons untethered to the ones already in our midst, such as increasing inequality, debt enslavement, and encroaching climate change, it is arguable that we must collectively learn to unroot or alienate ourselves from current pragmatic and cognitive constraints. Rather than overcoming alienation as a state of isolating disconnectedness, we learn to embrace its force of displacement to experiment with other structures of cohabitation. In this way, alienation is positioned as an affirmative project: a freedom to construct new systems of collective life. This talk will introduce a “synthetic” approach as a certain methodology for alienation affording creative world-making without reverting to top-down blueprint models of utopian schematics.